Gossipy and judgmental thumbnail sketches of First Ladiesnot every one, but enough of them to wear the topic out entirely. Presidential daughter, biographer, and novelist Truman (Murder on the Potomac, 1994, etc.) is unabashedly opinionated about this famous job, which, one senses from this book, ought to be: Protect your man from the big, bad world; comfort him when you cannot; and don't cost him any votes. The women themselves come second. As Truman says, ``While I am heartily in favor of women achieving maximum opportunities and power, I doubt that the First Lady is the ideal symbolic vehicle for this ascent.'' Not surprisingly, Nancy Reagan, who exemplifies the sort of loving ``protector'' Truman admires, comes in for gentler handling than does Eleanor Roosevelt, whose accomplishments, we are told, are to be weighed against her ``tragic limitations'' as a wife. Although Truman can be effusive in her praise (she calls Lady Bird Johnson the ``almost perfect First Lady''), she's not one to miss a good opportunity for sniping at her subjects, as when she serves up examples of Jacqueline Kennedy's ``visceral repugnance for average Americans.'' One might almost take Truman for anti- elitist, did she not also say of Dolley Madison, the daughter of an unsuccessful businessman and a boardinghouse keeper, that ``there is nothing in her past to account for her combination of good taste and impeccable hospitality.'' Still, inclined to find something good in each of these women, Truman might have been stumped to find a real loser had not her father, Harry S Truman, judged Warren Harding the worst president. And so Florence Harding turns out to be a ``mean-spirited'' woman with a ``dÇclassÇ style, whining voice, and overbearing manner.'' Well-known lives revisited from a perspective that is more convincingly insider than insightful. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43439-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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